Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Bill of Gates fallacy

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Brad De Long wrote:

> Neoliberals hope that multinational corporations, financial analysts,
> bond-fund managers, and bond raters will in the end be able to apply
> some constructive pressure to improve the situation: better the
> discipline of the world market than no discipline on
> less-than-fully-democratic governments at all.
> This neoliberal line may sound a little too pat. But it is virtually
> the only game in town. Critics try to poke holes in it, but the
> neoliberal stance has no serious challengers these days in
> policy-making.

This may be true in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. But what are we
to make of the East Asian core countries or Central Europe, or countries
like China which are learning the lessons being forgotten by Western
Europe? Isn't it true that we can't really speak of a single model of
neoliberalism -- free trade in everything -- but instead of a set of
competing *neoliberalisms* -- East Asian trade policies, which are
coordinated through the keiretsu, chaebol, and still-powerful
developmental states; EU-style integration, which involves social
democratic income transfers from Germany to Spain via the EIB; and finally
US-style Bubble neoliberalism, or wild financial speculations on other
peoples' industrial bases?

> Rodrik fears that developing economy governments taht do not
> carefully manage international economic integration will wind up
> without the ability to achieve anything like what was achieved in the
> post-World War II industrial core: the good society (not the great
> society) and the mixed economy.
> He also throws down the gauntlet. He claims that globalization cannot
> be a replacement for (failed) social democracy in the developing
> periphery. Instead, he believes that globalization must be assisted
> by (successful) social democracy if it is to produce a world with a
> human face.

Rodrik has a point, but misses a little thing called the American Empire,
which ruled the world-economy for fifty years or so, and trashed countless
attempts by countries to institute autonomous or social democratic
development policies (treating Latin America just like the Soviet Union
treated Eastern Europe). Don't you think it's just the slightest bit
interesting that the most innovative and successful models of social and
economic development -- East Asian keiretsu, EU social democracy --
emerged at the global interzones *between* the battling Cold War powers?
Castro's nationalization of the sugar industry wasn't all that much more
radical than land reform in South Korea or nationalization of the
industrial base and financial system in Taiwan, was it? If this is even
halfway to the mark, maybe one of the most important contributions we can
make as First Worlders is to fight our own elites, and give the rest of
the planet the breathing room they need to get their act together. As
usual, the Euroleft seems to be leading the way here.

-- Dennis